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Beyond Wishful Thinking

Life without Illusion

Death

Everything in our existence points beyond itself. We must nevertheless
die. We cannot grasp the ground of being. Our desires are insatiable.
Our lives fail adequately to express our natures; our circumstances reg-
ularly subject us to belittlement.
Religion has been both an attempt to interpret the meaning of these
irreparable fl aws in the human condition and a way of dealing with
them. It has told us that everything is ultimately all right.
However, everything is not all right. A turn in the religious con-
sciousness of humanity would begin in an approach to these defects
that abandoned the impulse to deny them. Religion would cease to con-
sole us for these frightening facts. Our hope might survive, changed.

Life is the greatest good. With life come surfeit, spontaneity, and sur-
prise: the capacity to see more, make more, and do more than all the
social and conceptual regimes in which we move can countenance. In
the face of all constraint, the experience of life is an experience of a fe-
cundity and a fullness without foreordained limits.
We exceed immeasurably the social and cultural worlds that we build
and inhabit. Th ere is always more in us, in each of us individually as
wel l as in all of us collectively, than there is or ever can be in them. Th ere
is always more that we have reason to value and power to produce than
any of these orders of life, or all of them together, can contain.